News:

"There is a terrible desperation to the increasingly pathetic rationalizations from the climate denial camp. This comes as no surprise if you take the long view; every single undone paradigm in history has died kicking and screaming, and our current petroleum paradigm 🐉🦕🦖 is no different. The trick here is trying to figure out how we all make it to the new ⚡ paradigm without dying ☠️ right along with the old one, kicking, screaming or otherwise." - William Rivers Pitt

Thonis-Heracleion (the Egyptian and Greek names of the city) is a city lost between legend and reality. Before the foundation of Alexandria in 331 BC, the city knew glorious times as the obligatory port of entry to Egypt for all ships coming from the Greek world. It had also a religious importance because of the temple of Amun, which played an important role in rites associated with dynasty continuity.

The city was founded probably around the 8th century BC, underwent diverse natural catastrophes, and finally sunk entirely into the depths of the Mediterranean in the 8th century AD.

Prior to its discovery in 2000 by the IEASM, no trace of Thonis-Heracleion had been found. Its name was almost razed from the memory of mankind, only preserved in ancient classic texts and rare inscriptions found on land by archaeologists.

The Greek historian Herodotus (5th century BC) tells us of a great temple that was built where the famous hero Herakles first set foot on to Egypt.He also reports of Helen’s visit to Heracleion with her lover Paris before the Trojan War. More than four centuries after Herodotus’ visit to Egypt, the geographer Strabo observed that the city of Heracleion, which possessed the temple of Herakles, is located straight to the east of Canopus at the mouth of the Canopic branch of the River Nile.

With his unique survey-based approach that utilises the most sophisticated technical equipment, Franck Goddio and his team from the IEASM, in cooperation with the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, were able to locate, map and excavate parts of the city of Thonis-Heracleion, which lies 6.5 kilometres off today’s coastline.

The city is located within an overall research area of 11 by 15 kilometres in the western part of Aboukir Bay. Franck Goddio has found important information on the ancient landmarks of Thonis-Heracleion, such as the grand temple of Amun and his son Khonsou (Herakles for the Greeks), the harbours that once controlled all trade into Egypt, and the daily life of its inhabitants.

He has also solved a historic enigma that has puzzled Egyptologists over the years: the archaeological material has revealed that Heracleion and Thonis were in fact one and the same city with two names; Heracleion being the name of the city for the Greeks and Thonis for the Egyptians.

The objects recovered from the excavations illustrate the cities’ beauty and glory, the magnificence of their grand temples and the abundance of historic evidence: colossal statues, inscriptions and architectural elements, jewelry and coins, ritual objects and ceramics - a civilization frozen in time.

The quantity and quality of the archaeological material excavated from the site of Thonis-Heracleion show that this city had known a time of opulence and a peak in its occupation from the 6th to the 4th century BC. This is readily seen in the large quantity of coins and ceramics dated to this period.

The port of Thonis-Heracleion had numerous large basins and functioned as a hub of international trade. The intense activity in the port fostered the city’s prosperity. More than seven hundred ancient anchors of various forms and over 60 wrecks dating from the 6th to the 2nd century BC are also an eloquent testimony to the intensity of maritime activity here.

The city extended all around the temple and a network of canals in and around the city must have given it a lake dwelling appearance. On the islands and islets dwellings and secondary sanctuaries were located. Excavations here have revealed beautiful archaeological material such as bronze statuettes. On the north side of the temple to Herakles, a grand canal flowed through the city from east to west and connected the port basins with a lake to the west.

Thanks Surly. I cannot figure out why, with the huge spike in the daily views I have on my DD newz channel, more people don't agree that I've got good content, visit my sight to jack up my views, and register. I don't get it.

I have discussed the page hit count mystery with create-a-forum support. No answer from them yet. I'm learning CSS so I can take this baby apart and put it back together any way I want, whenever I want (same with wikidot!). I am tired of all this web software mystery out there. I am putting my programmer hat on from many years ago and I'm going get this stuff DOWN once and for all.

The Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. article is almost done. There REALLY WAS a "SHERLOCK HOLMES" connection! Arthur Conan Doyle gave Sherlock the "Holmes" last name in honor of Holmes' father, a noted medical doctor.

As to why people don'r register, who can say? I would think that anyone who follows one of your links from D would have to end up here, yes?

Anyhow, the thread of lost civilizations is compelling to me. Too many oddball and out of place artifacts without explanation have been discovered for me to believe that the conventional narrative of history is true...

As to why people don'r register, who can say? I would think that anyone who follows one of your links from D would have to end up here, yes?

Anyhow, the thread of lost civilizations is compelling to me. Too many oddball and out of place artifacts without explanation have been discovered for me to believe that the conventional narrative of history is true...

This is a test.

Okay, that worked. BUT, to make it work I had to RIGHT click on the quote and select "open in new tab". At the new tab the reply was set up with the quoted post. Weird, I know. But you can make it work that way until I figure out how to make it work like it does in the DD forum. I am now going to log out as Admin and log in as a guest to see if it works for the lowest common denominator of posters.

Empirical Test

Okay, that worked. BUT, to make it work I had to RIGHT click on the quote and select "open in new tab". At the new tab the reply was set up with the quoted post. Weird, I know. But you can make it work that way until I figure out how to make it work like it does in the DD forum. I am now going to log out as Admin and log in as a guest to see if it works for the lowest common denominator of posters.

This is a test to see if a guest can use the quote feature. It worked this time by just hitting the quote button exactly like it works at the DD (LEFT click!).

As a guest I see that I have to enter a reCaptcha thing to make sure I am a human. Here goes nuttin'.

It refused to accept it until I entered a guest name and a valid e-mail address.

I entered, "Empirical Test" for the guest name and a valid e-mail address with a new reCaptcha "I am human" check.

rchaeologists have unearthed traces of a previously unknown, 14th-century Canaanite city buried underneath the ruins of another city in Israel.

The traces include an Egyptian amulet of Amenhotep III and several pottery vessels from the Late Bronze Age unearthed at the site of Gezer, an ancient Canaanite city.

Gezer was once a major center that sat at the crossroads of trade routes between Asia and Africa, said Steven Ortiz, a co-director of the site's excavations and a biblical scholar at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

The remains of the ancient city suggest the site was used for even longer than previously known. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]

Biblical city

The ancient city of Gezer has been an important site since the Bronze Age, because it sat along the Way of the Sea, or the Via Maris, an ancient trade route that connected Egypt, Syria, Anatolia and Mesopotamia.

The city was ruled over many centuries by Canaanites, Egyptians and Assyrians, and Biblical accounts from roughly the 10th century describe an Egyptian pharaoh giving the city to King Solomon as a wedding gift after marrying his daughter.

"It's always changed hands throughout history," Ortiz told LiveScience.The site has been excavated for a century, and most of the excavations so far date to the the 10th through eighth centuries B.C. Gezer also holds some of the largest underground water tunnels of antiquity, which were likely used to keep the water supply safe during sieges.

But earlier this summer, Ortiz and his colleague Samuel Wolff of the Israel Antiquities Authority noticed traces of an even more ancient city from centuries before King Solomon's time. Among the layers was a section that dated to about the 14th century B.C., containing a scarab, or beetle, amulet from King Amenhotep III, the grandfather of King Tut. They also found shards of Philistine pottery.During that period, the ancient site was probably a Canaanite city that was under Egyptian influence.The findings are consistent with what scholars suspected of the site, said Andrew Vaughn, a biblical scholar and executive director of the American Schools of Oriental Research, who was not involved in the study.

"It's not surprising that a city that was of importance in the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah would have an older history and would have played an important political and military role prior to that time," Vaughn told LiveScience. "If you didn't control Gezer, you didn't control the east-west trade route."

But once the location of that major road moved during the Roman period, the city waned in importance. It was later conquered and destroyed, but never fully rebuilt."Just like today when you have a ghost town — where you move the train and that city goes out of use," Ortiz said.

Two scientists, Paul Weinzweig and Pauline Zalitzki, working off the coast of Cuba and using a robot submersible, have confirmed that a gigantic city exists at the bottom of the ocean. The site of the ancient city — that includes several sphinxes and at least four giant pyramids plus other structures — amazingly sits within the boundaries of the fabled Bermuda Triangle.

According to a report by Arclein of Terra Forming Terra, Cuban Subsea Pyramid Complex, the evidence points to the city being simultaneously inundated with rising waters and the land sinking into the sea. This correlates exactly with the Atlantis legend.

The disaster may have occurred at the end of the last Ice Age. As the Arctic icecap catastrophically melted it caused sea levels to rise quickly around the world, especially affecting the Northern Hemisphere. Coast lines changed; land was lost; islands (even island continents) disappeared.

Arclein observes: “At the time uplifted portions of the Mid Atlantic Ridge subsided also including Lyonese and the home islands and land mass around the Azores. Even if that had not happened, this subsidence was amply large enough

This would have produced an orthogonal pressure forcing subsidence to either East or West. Since the ridge between Cuba and Yucatan is the natural point of weakness between the Gulf subsidence basin and the Caribbean subsidence basin, it naturally subsided deeply. The driver for all this was the hydrostatic changes brought about by both the original crustal shift of 12,900 years ago that I have called the Pleistocene Nonconformity and the slow uplift of the Hudson Bay Basin brought about by the ending of the Ice Age.”

Cuban missile crisis stops research

According to journalist Luis Mariano Fernandez the city was first discovered decades ago, but all access to it was stopped during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis. (http://www.luismarianofernandez.com/AtlantidaEnCuba4.html) To view in other languages, use the google translate tool bar.

The U.S. government discovered the alleged place during the Cuban missile crisis in the sixties, Nuclear submarines cruising in the Gulf (in deep sea) met pyramid structures. They immediately shut down the site and took control of him and the objects, in order that it will not come to Russians hands.”

The science team of deep ocean experts, archaeologists and oceanographers found ruins of ancient buildings 600 feet below the ocean. They say the city is Atlantis.

Look carefully, in the muky water a giant pyramid is visible

Pyramids and sphinxes bigger than Egypt’s

Evidence that the island of Cuba is the vestige of a once mighty culture is supported by Zalitzki’s discovery on the island of extremely ancient symbols and pictograms identical to those seen on the underwater structures.

Using exploration submersibles, they discovered amazingly huge pyramid structures similar to (but larger than) the pyramids in Giza, Egypt. They estimate the Atlantis pyramids are constructed with stones weighing many hundreds of tons.

Speaking with a scientist about the possibility that the ruins are indeed Atlantis, Fernandez reports the expert replied:

“…in the Yucatan cultures today is possible that what still remains of the aborigines of those places perhaps the Olmecs or some very primitive civilization of Yucatan, the northern part of Central America—originated according to them on an island that sank by a cataclysm. This island is called Atlanticú.”

That too fits the stories about the sudden demise of the wondrous Atlantis.

Atlanticú. Atlantis. The aboriginal natives still call it that in their history.

During an interview about the exploration of the mega-city, Fernandez asked lead scientist Pauline Zalitzki about the civilaztion that built it.

“When we published the first news of this finding,” she said, “the University of Veracruz was interested in our work and we had recorded images of these structures on the seabed. Specifically, the Institute of Anthropology of the University excavations invited me. They were doing [studies] on parts and ruins of the Olmec civilization.

The Olmecs and other native peoples all have primary morphology marking the arrival of this continent. This mean coming from the direction of Cuba, and had to occur in a very large earthquake where their land sank. Morphologies indicate that they belong to three families who were saved. One of these families came to the coast of Veracruz, which are supposedly the Olmec. Others came to Central America and traveled to the Pacific coast, and these families created the civilization of the Americas as we know it today, because they distributed all their knowledge.

When these anthropologists saw underwater images of this city, and saw some stone monoliths, some symbol, and inscriptions, they identified with Olmec motifs. They were very surprised.”

The Olmecs devolved from the survivors of Atlantis, a much superior culture destroyed aft the end of the Ice Age flooding. The world was reshaped and a super-civilization destroyed, remembered for millennia only in legend and a passing refernce by the philosopher Plato.

But Atlantis was real, is real: scientists Paul Weinzweig and Pauline Zalitzki have found it.

Surly,The DD has been getting smacked a lot recently. Do you think it's the increase in traffic or a deliberate attempt to muzzle our voices (denial of service attack) there by somebody that doesn't like the increased readership? I've noticed that even the waste based society thread that hardly ever gets new posts is mushrooming in the views.

The sea off Yonaguni is a popular diving location during the winter months owing to its large population of hammerhead sharks. In 1987, while looking for a good place to observe the sharks, Kihachiro Aratake, a director of the Yonaguni-Cho Tourism Association, noticed some singular seabed formations resembling architectonic structures.[3] Shortly thereafter, a group of scientists directed by Masaaki Kimura of the University of the Ryūkyūs visited the formations.

The formation has since become a relatively popular attraction for divers despite the strong currents.[3] In 1997, Japanese industrialist Yasuo Watanabe sponsored an informal expedition comprising writers John Anthony West and Graham Hancock, photographer Santha Faiia, geologist Robert Schoch, a few sport divers and instructors, and a shooting crew for Channel 4 and Discovery Channel. Another notable visitor was freediver Jacques Mayol, who wrote a book on his dives at Yonaguni.[4]

Main features

The Monument consists of medium to very fine sandstones and mudstones of the Lower Miocene Yaeyama Group believed to have been deposited about 20 million years ago.[1] Most of the formations are connected to the underlying rock mass (as opposed to being assembled out of freestanding rocks).

The formation called "The Turtle"

The main feature (the "Monument" proper) is a rectangular formation measuring about 150 by 40 m (490 by 130 ft) and about 27 m (90 ft) tall; the top is about 5 m (16 ft) below sea level.[5]

Some of its details are said to be:

two closely spaced pillars which rise to within eight feet of the surface;a 5 m (16 ft) wide ledge that encircles the base of the formation on three sides;a stone column about 7 m (23 ft) tall;a straight wall 10 m (33 ft) long;an isolated boulder resting on a low platform;a low star-shaped platform;a triangular depression with two large holes at its edge;an L-shaped rock.

Artificial structures

The flat parallel faces, sharp edges, and mostly right angles of the formation have led many people, including many of the underwater photographers and divers who have visited the site and some scholars, to the opinion that those features are human-made.[6] These people include Gary and Cecilia Hagland[6] and Tom Holden, who went on underwater expeditions to study and photograph the site. These features include a trench that has two internal 90° angles as well as the twin megaliths that appear to have been placed there. These megaliths have straight edges and square corners.

However, sea currents have been known to move large rocks on a regular basis.[2][5][7][8] Some of those who see the formations as being largely natural claim that they may have been modified by human hands.[1] The semiregular terraces of the Monument have been compared to other examples of megalithic architecture, such as the rock-hewn terraces seen at Sacsayhuaman.[9] The formations have also been compared to the Okinawa Tomb, a rock-hewn structure of uncertain age.

Other evidence presented by those who favor an artificial origin[who?] include the two round holes (about 2 feet wide, according to photographs) on the edge of the Triangle Pool feature and a straight row of smaller holes that have been interpreted as an abandoned attempt to split off a section of the rock by means of wedges, as in ancient quarries.

Kimura believes that he has identified traces of drawings of animals and people engraved on the rocks, including a horselike sign that he believes resembles a character from the Kaida script. Some have also interpreted a formation on the side of one of the monuments as a crude moai-like "face".

Supporters of artificial origin, such as Graham Hancock,[6] also argue that, while many of the features seen at Yonaguni are also seen in natural sandstone formations throughout the world, the concentration of so many peculiar formations in such a small area is highly unlikely.[6] They also point to the relative absence of loose blocks on the flat areas of the formation, which would be expected if they were formed solely by natural erosion and fracturing.[citation needed] Robert Schoch has noted that the rocks are swept with strong currents.[10]

If any part of the monument was deliberately constructed or modified, that must have happened during the most recent ice age, when the sea level was much lower than it is today (e.g. 39 m (130 ft) lower around 10,000 years BCE). During the ice age, the East China Sea was a narrow bay opening to the ocean at today's Tokara Gap.[11] The Sea of Japan was an inland sea and there was no Yellow Sea; people and animals could walk into the Ryukyu peninsula from the continent. Therefore, Yonaguni was the southern end of a land bridge that connected it to Taiwan, Ryūkyū, Japan, and Asia. This fact is underscored by a rock pillar in a now-submerged cave that has been interpreted as a fused stalactite-stalagmite pair, which could only form above water.

Kimura first estimated that this must be at least 10,000 years old (8,000 BCE), dating it to a time when it would have been above water.[7] In a report given to the 21st Pacific Science Congress in 2007, he revised this estimate and dated it to 2,000 to 3,000 years ago as the sea level then was close to current levels. He suggests that after construction tectonic activity caused it to be submerged below sea level. Archaeologist Richard J. Pearson believes this to be unlikely.[10] Kimura believes he can identify a pyramid, castles, roads, monuments and a stadium, and has surmised that the site may be a remnant of the mythical lost continent of Mu.[2]

The existence of an ancient stoneworking tradition at Yonaguni and other Ryukyu islands is demonstrated by some old tombs and several stone vessels of uncertain age.[1] Small camps, pottery, stone tools and large fireplaces were found on Yonaguni possibly dating back to 2500 BCE; Pearson notes that these were small communities, adding "They are not likely to have had extra energy for building stone monuments."[10]

Must say, AG, I am endlessly fascinated by lost history and anthropology.

Graham Hancock wrote a book about a submerged Japanese city some years ago. I enjoyed that, and it too was complete with peole arguing against, saying that dressed right angles were natural formations, etc.